Flights Of Fancy


   As the Balkan crisis rapidly escalated into another highly contested front of the war, Great Britain found she had little choice but to commit her national army to the continent as opposed to North America where it had always been intended. Even the most zealous of advocates for the defense of Canada, and that included Field Marshall Wolseley, had to bow to the pragmatic concerns that revolved around the fear of  a Russian occupied Constantinople. The Austrians had not only failed to capture Belgrade but, they had now encountered the first Russian troops there. It was clear that the Russians were, once again, surprising everyone with their ability to rapidly deploy their forces.
This was the reason for the Potsdam Conference. Henry Balfour and Garnet Wolseley headed up a small delegation of key British military officials who traveled to Germany and met with their counterparts so that they could plan out and coordinate the deployment of British troops on the continent. One of their party was acting in his first official capacity as Second Sealord. He left for Germany on his third day of taking his new job. His name was Admiral John “Jackie” Fisher and his appointment to the second highest position in the Royal Navy was a signal that change was coming.
The shake up of the admiralty, caused by the Battle of the Yellow Sea, was still playing itself out. The Salisbury cabinet had become well aware that their navy needed new blood and Jackie Fisher’s star had been on the rise for some time before the war. He was not just a top notch fleet commander but, the man had worked in nearly every logistical posting the Royal Navy offered. He understood the very inner workings of the organization and had a reputation for not just insisting on change but, understanding what that change should be.
At the start of the war, Fisher had been commanding Royal Navy assets in the Caribbean. This was considered an unimportant posting since the Confederacy generally handled most of Britain’s concerns in this region. It was important to Fisher who, while working very closely with his Confederate allies, had seen most of the projects they had been working on. This included the construction of the battleship Texas and her revolutionary innovations. Unlike many of his counterparts, Fisher did not just scoff at anything that came out of America and he was well aware of the importance of many of the Confederate innovations. He would be instrumental in green lighting Britain’s own version of the Texas, the HMS Dreadnaught.
Fisher was recalled to England in the aftermath of the Yellow Sea. He spent some time working in Plymouth, and instituted any number of reforms in the Naval Ordinance Bureau while he was there. It must be noted that while a good number of influential men recognized Fisher’s talent, even more seemed to have been fearful of the possibility that he might take their job. The fact was that his career as an admiral, which had spanned ten years in 1900, was one of holding a string of posts that were considered dead end jobs in the Royal Navy. None of these would restrain Fisher or, quite literally in this case, the future that he advocated. The war had now shown that he was right about too many things and, as a result, he was finally placed in a job where he could begin to bring these ideas to fruition.
It was while he was in Potsdam that he unexpectedly came in contact with one of these new ideas. Up till now he had no idea that this project even existed. Fisher and his staff had come to Germany to discuss details of how to transport the army to Germany. He was aided in these discussions by his fellow Royal Navy admiral, Prince Louis Battenberg. Being both German and an officer in the Royal Navy was now helping out Battenberg’s career in no small way. He was also able to talk with his German counterparts in their native tongue.
One of these counterparts was none other than Admiral Tirpitz who was, once again, back in Germany. He discovered from his visiting British allies that he was every bit as popular in England as he was at home. Tirpitz’s participation in the Kitchener raid in Mozambique had prompted the British press to write any number of colorful stories about the German admiral, most of which were complete fabrications, and the British public were devouring any scrap of information they could get about the man. Tirpitz found it all amusing but, little else.
It was during these discussions that both Tirpitz and the other key German Admiral, Otto Von Diederichs, made any number of references to a special project that the Kriegsmarine was working on. These references were completely lost in translation as Battenberg did not seem to even understand what they were talking about in German, let alone being able to translate it into English. It was not helped any by the fact that Tirpitz and Diederichs were constantly bickering with each other. Neither man commanded the others respect and they were both highly divided in their opinion of the project in question. Fisher realized that whatever these strange references were, it must be something of importance because of how heated the German debate became.
At some point, Fisher told Battenberg to ask a very direct question about all of these strange references that, up till this point, sounded as if the Germans had figured out how make a railroad engine fly. This question confused Tirpitz because he had been told that the British had been informed of the project. In truth, they had been but, very few in the British military knew about it and even fewer understood it. This all seems to have been due to a clerk at Pall Mall who thought the notification was a joke and tossed it in a bin.
As it turned out, Wolseley knew all about the Zeppelin project but, he had found out by other means than official notification. He also just assumed that others knew about it, so, he never said a word since he equally considered it “flights of fancy“ and unimportant. Fisher seems to have thought his lack of knowledge about this project was largely due to the fact that he was new to his current position. He would later find out that no one in the Royal Navy had any knowledge of it at all. After about two hours of translated explaining, and what could only be described as a game of charades, Fisher finally began to see where the Germans were going with this. It was not the fact that they were using balloons to fly since that was both a common technology and used by most armies for observation. It was the idea of powered flight and Fisher quickly realized it’s potential. He also had something of his own that he could bring to the table.
What Fisher did not know on that day, mainly because it seems that Tirpitz left the room still believing that the British Admirals knew details that they did not, was the fact that not only had Germany been pursuing this technology but, they had already produced an operational model and were set to go into production if it worked. Fisher would only learn of this when the rest of the world did and by means of the newspapers. He would not have long to wait because, as he sat in the plush Potsdam conference room, LZ-4 was being prepped for her first combat mission over France.
Fisher was still in Potsdam when he learned of this and, he quickly volunteered the knowledge of a secret British project that sounded even more absurd than a flying locomotive. This technology was being informally called the, “Lightening Detector.” Fisher had connected the dots in the conference room when Battenberg finally figured out how to translate the idea to him. The combination of these technologies could be powerful and the wheels of Fisher’s mind began to turn. Once again, he was right.